Carlos Alcaraz announced this Friday that he will not compete in the Rome Masters 1000, from May 8 to 19, as a result of the injury he has had in his forearm for a month. The Murcian, who will turn 21 this Sunday, lost on Wednesday against Andrey Rublev in the Madrid quarterfinals, and despite the fact that after the duel against the Russian he assured that he was confident of being able to participate in the Foro Italico event, he will not be able to participate. This Friday he underwent a medical test in Murcia and the result forces him to stop again, after having previously missed the Monte Carlo (Masters 1000) and Barcelona (ATP 500) tournaments.
“I felt pain after playing in Madrid, discomfort in my arm. Today I had some tests and I have muscle edema in the pronator teres, as a result of my last injury. So unfortunately I won’t be able to play in Rome. “I need rest to recover and be able to play one hundred percent without pain,” the tennis player wrote in his X profile. His goal is, therefore, to recover his muscles well and arrive in the best possible conditions at Roland Garros, which will begin on the 26th. of May. If the process concludes satisfactorily, the Spanish tennis player will land in Paris having played only three matches on European clay. It should be remembered that before, in February, he played three in Buenos Aires and a fourth in Rio de Janeiro, where he injured his right ankle (moderate sprain).
Alcaraz arrived at the Caja Mágica in Madrid without having any guarantee that he would be able to compete. In fact, in the conference after the defeat against Rublev he said that the week before the Madrid tournament he had not been able to pick up the racket for fear that the injury could aggravate. “If I can play three or four games, I would be happy,” he said. Later, in preparatory training he felt improvement and finally decided to compete. He overcame the first three stages – against Alexander Shevchenko (59th), Thiago Seyboth Wild (63rd) and Jan Lennard Struff (24th) – with more efficiency than brilliance and sent an optimistic message: “Now I can only think about lifting the title.”
However, he then closed the match against Rublev with a bad feeling. He said that his time at the Caja Mágica had been “very positive”, because at the end of the day he did not trust that he would reach the quarterfinals, but he said that some “thoughts” about the forearm were still circulating in his mind and that he was going to continue working “to recover normality on the right.” Alcaraz played all the matches with the affected area wrapped in a compression mesh that, he said, he would continue to wear in Rome. It won’t be like that. The medical examination carried out this Friday recommends that he stop and concentrate on recovery so as not to jeopardize his attendance at Roland Garros.
Last year, the Murcian – champion this season in Indian Wells and owner of two majors, in addition to having reached the summit of the circuit in 2022— reached the semifinals of the French great, and in Rome he lost in the third round against the Hungarian Fabián Marozsan. He is not in danger, therefore, of the third position that he currently defends. Daniil Medvedev’s defeat on Thursday against the Czech Jiri Lehecka prevented the Muscovite from being able to take it from him, and the loot obtained a year ago at the Foro Italico was so meager (45 points) that the absence of the next few days will hardly have an impact on his locker. But, regardless of his accounts, the situation invites him to stop and he accepts it with resignation.
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